Geraldine A. Johnson is University Lecturer in History of Art at the University of Oxford, and a fellow of Christ Church, Oxford. She received her Ph.D. from Harvard University. Her publications range from studies of Italian Renaissance art to considerations of contemporary American sculpture, and from women patrons in Early Modern Europe to the history of photography. Her work has appeared in important journals such as The Burlington Magazine, The Art Bulletin, Art History, and Renaissance Quarterly. In 1997, Cambridge University Press published a prize-winning essay collection she co-edited titled Picturing Women in Renaissance and Baroque Italy. The same press also published another volume she edited in 1998 titled Sculpture and Photography: Envisioning the Third Dimension. At present, she is completing a book on the tactile and visual reception of sculpture in Early Modern Italy.

Johnson has succeeded in packing a great deal of intelligent discussion into a very limited space. I would wholeheartedly recommend this book for anyone, from teenagers onwards, requiring an introduction to current views on Renaissance Art

• 1. Whose Renaissance? Whose art? ; 2. The art of the altarpiece ; 3. Story-telling in Renaissance Art ; 4. The challenge of nature and the antique ; 5. Portraiture and the rise of 'Renaissance Man' ; 6. The story of a square ; 7. Objects and images for the domestic sphere ; 8. Did women have a Renaissance? ; 9. Michelangelo and the birth of the Artist...and of Art History